A Case of Conscience

"He hasn't anything to tell us yet, by his lights," Ruiz said. "And for him, we lack the authority to put questions. Any adult Lithian could question him, but obviously we don't qualify — and what Mike calls the foster-parent relationship couldn't mean anything to a creature adapted to a solitary childhood."

Michelis did not respond.

"He used to call us," Liu said sadly. "At least, he used to call you."

"That's different. That's the pleasure response; it has nothing to do with authority, or affection either. If you were to put an electrode into the septal or caudate nucleus areas in the brain of a cat, or a rat, so that they could stimulate themselves electrically by pushing a pedal, you could train them to do almost anything that's within their powers, for no other reward but that jolt in the head. In the same way, a cat or a rat or a dog will learn to respond to its name, or to initiate some action, in order to gain pleasure. But you don't expect the animal to talk to you or answer questions just because it can do that."

"I never heard of the brain experiments," Liu said. "I think that's horrible."

"I think so too," Ruiz said. "It's an old line of research that got sidetracked somehow. I've never understood why some of our megalomaniacs didn't follow it up in human beings. A dictatorship founded on that device might really last a thousand years. But it has nothing to do with what you're asking of Egtverchi. When he's ready to talk, he'll talk. In the meantime, we don't have the stature to compel him to answer questions. For that, we would have to be twelve-foot Lithian adults."

Egtverchi's eyes filmed, and he brought his hands together suddenly.

"You are already too tall," his harsh voice said over the annunciator system.

Liu clapped her hands together in delighted imitation.

"See, see, Ramon, you're wrong! Egtverchi, what do you mean? Tell us!"

Egtverchi said experimentally: "Liu. Liu. Liu."

"Yes, yes. That's right, Egtverchi. Go on, go on — what did you mean — tell us!"

"Liu." Egtverchi seemed satisfied. The colors in his wattles died down. He was again almost a statue.

After a moment, there was an explosive snort from Michelis. Liu turned to him with a start, and, without really meaning to, so did Ruiz. But it was too late. The big New Englander had already turned his back on them, as though disgusted at himself for having broken his own silence. Slowly, Liu too turned her back, if only to hide her face from everyone, even Egtverchi. Ruiz was left standing alone at the vertex of the tetrahedron of disaffection.

"This is going to be a fine performance for a prospective citizen of the United Nations to turn in," Michelis said suddenly, bitterly, from somewhere behind his shoulder. "I suppose you expected nothing else when you asked me here. What moved you to tell me what vast progress he was making? As I got the story, he ought to have been propounding theorems by this time."

"Time," Egtverchi said, "is a function of change, and change is the expression of the relative validity of two propositions, one of which contains a time t and the other a time f-prime, which differ from each other in no respect except that one contains the coordinate t and the other the coordinate f-prime."

"That's all very well," Michelis said coldly, turning to look up at the great head. "But I know where you got it from. If you're only a parrot, you're not going to be a Citizen of this culture; you can take that from me."

"Who are you?" Egtverchi said.

"I'm your sponsor, God help me," Michelis said. "I know my own name, and I know what kind of record goes with it. If you expect to be a citizen, Egtverchi, you'll have to do better than pass yourself off as Bertrand Russell, or Shakespeare for that matter."

"I don't think he has any such notion," Ruiz said. "We explained the citizenship proposal to him, but he didn't give us any sign that he understood it. He just finished reading the Principia last week, so there's nothing unlikely about his feeding it back. He does that now and then."

"In first-order feedback," Egtverchi said somnolently, "if the connections are reversed, any small disturbance will be self-aggravating. In second-order feedback, going outside normal limits will force random changes in the network which will stop only when the system is stable again."

"God damn it!" Mike said savagely. "Now where did he get that? Stop it, you! You don't fool me for a minute!"

Egtverchi closed his eyes and fell silent.

Suddenly Michelis shouted: "Speak up, damn it!"

Without opening his eyes, Egtverchi said: "Hence the system can develop vicarious function if some of its parts are destroyed." Then he was silent again; he was asleep. He was often asleep, even these days.

"Fugue," Ruiz said softly. "He thought you were threatening him."